I think the spell is finally broken...

[Daysnconfuddled]

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/

I certainly recognise this. I was previously a member of the Labour Party, though have voted Green in the past. Spoiled my ballot (no Communist Party candidate or suitable independent).

I'm sure some people think I'm letting the Tories or even Reform in, but I just can't support males in female spaces. I very much hope Labour will see sense at some point.

So do I. Otherwise we risk a mess like the American one. Left/Liberal blunders that hand the moral high ground or the obvious commonsense approach to the Right on a plate.

If they check out the polls, they won't be touching the toxic trans issue with a barge pole.

Check the Megan Kelly YouTube video posted this morning.

I was exactly the same. Depressing, wasn't it?

I was a Labour member, leafletted for the council elections and everything.

Joined many other women in leaving on 1st May 2018.

I think that's quite a utopian vision. The manifestations of sexual dimorphism won't go away so you will have all the same problems in those "neutral" spaces that made people want separate spaces to begin with.

Sure. It's supposed to be. I'm not suggesting this will happen or even that it should. It's a thought experiment to counteract the assumption that restoring single sex provisions means people who have had surgery or just preferred more gender ambiguous environments will be out of place and seen as disabled and damaged.

Time doesn't go backwards. Culture changes. If because of genderism there's a genuine desire now for more shared spaces then more shared spaces can still emerge alongside single sex provisions. And because they are alongside not instead, there is always a place to escape to.

And because there is always a place to escape to, in that world women's participation in "neutral" spaces would be a matter of choice. So if they didn't work for women they wouldn't become a thing. The existence of single sex spaces would ironically make the gender neutral spaces work better.

Neutral places only work if abusers don’t abuse them. Men have always abused women and unless something miraculous happens, that part of culture will never change. Neutral places will always be a place to abuse.

In which case women won't use them. That's the literal point of the post you replied to. Anyone who wants to offer a neutral space can still do so, they just have to do so in addition to single sex spaces. And people who only want to offer single sex provisions can also do so.(subject to other discrimination rules of course).

You are thinking about the thought experiment backwards from the endpoint of gender neutral spaces continuing to exist and saying in that case they will still have the same problems because of men, but the story I was proposing as the thought experiment runs the other way (obviously! Time has to run beginning to end not vice versa!) : once single sex provisions are also an option again, we would only get to an endpoint where gender neutral spaces are wanted, used, even preferred if those spaces work for women as well, because the women would have a choice.

Once women, including those who currently do not identify as such, have a choice and can vote with their feet as to whether each individual gender neutral option on offer works for them or not, the only gender neutral options that will survive are ones that work for women.

And again, thought experiment. I'm not saying this will happen, or even that it should happen. I'm just saying the catastrophising about people caught up in genderism having no place to feel they belong is only one possible outcome; other futures are also available.

This. DS1 is currently very worried about his teenage, gender-confused, obviously very vulnerable friend who is currently in a constant state of weeping terror that 'the whole world hates them'.

I'm really fucking angry this morning at all the irresponsible zealots who:
*Assured this fragile, confused kid that their preferences and interests meant they weren't a 'proper' member of their natal sex and could change to the other one
*Insisted that anyone who wouldn't play along with the pretence hated them and wanted them dead
*Pushed, bullied and intimidated until women, corporations and even the government had to say NO, we're standing by reality.

And having done that, caused all that damage, have the FUCKING CHEEK now to say it's on the women who said no. Drop hands, walk away, shrug and leave others to pick up the pieces.

Hell mend you, you fucking ghouls. Fucking over confused kids in pursuit of gratifying men with fetishes.

I despise the lot of you.

Generalising to a whole board full of posters is a bit daft.
You're talking piffle

Transgender people will still exist.

They will still use the spaces they feel are most appropriate and safest for them.

However they will be persecuted for doing so.

Which many of you here will enjoy.

Women won't notice any difference in terms of their day to day life, because most people have never and will never knowingly come into contact with a transgender person.

But hey, enjoy the 'win'.

Maybe just consider the price a generation of women will pay for it in terms of loss of access to reproductive care, employment rights, access to higher education, protection from domestic violence etc etc.

@izimbra that was a lot of words to say "I don't care about women"

Yes, you stupid women. We warned you that if you didn't let men have what they wanted you would just make it worse for yourselves in the long run.

I hope that is a typo and all men who expose themselves to women, or commit voyeurism will be ‘prosecuted’ for those sexual crimes. That men don’t get special treatment when they claim a religious belief of ‘gender identity’, and can commit exposure and voyeurism against women and girls to their hearts content after that. At the very least. People don’t change sex, and it is mendacious at best to pretend they do. There may be some other more sinister motivations from some people.

Yes, that this persecution of women will stop. The gaslighting that a dude ain’t really a dude if he claims otherwise. That women may have fair opportunities in life and sports again. That they won’t be put in danger, as those men who really want to gain access to spaces where women and girls are in a state of undress or vulnerable will fail to be given carte Blanche to do what they want. And men of any belief won’t get to steal women’s awards, achievements, grants.

Sooo let me get this right...

Women won't notice any difference in terms of their day to day life, because most people have never and will never knowingly come into contact with a transgender person.

but also

They will still use the spaces they feel are most appropriate and safest for them.
However they will be persecuted for doing so.

So women won't knowingly notice a trans person (presumably because they pass so well) and yet we will still persecute them for using our spaces?
How will we know they're using our spaces and thus "persecute" them if we don't know that they're in them?
It's not logical.

Th I think some of the worry that people will feel out of place in same sex changing rooms and such is manufactured.

There has been some legitimate worry among effeminate men about "locker room" kinds of scenarios, though I think that is fearless common now. But no one has really cared about whether women in women's spaces were gnc.

I think there is actually a lot of silliness about gnc people being counter-cultural and therefore having issues. Which in part may come from people who are having personal struggles with their self image - they are essentially projecting those on others and seeing disapproval where there is actually indifference.

There is some reason, I think, to consider that people who have already transitioned medically will have some struggles. Most of which are the same ones detransitioners face now. Ultimately people are going to have to come to terms with the medical abuse they have suffered, and in many cases chosen. I would hope others will be kind - by which I mean be sensitive, as they navigate new rules. I would hope the people in the "Psychological community" will be prepared to help them come to terms with the reality that they are in fact male or female, and it's not ok to intrude on opposite sex spaces like change rooms and toilets - it's a violation of other people's privacy. But I am sympathetic that a lot of those people were told, by people who should have known better, that they should expect to be able to use those spaces.

Frankly the psychological community is going to have a whole lot of explaining and apologizing to do to those people.

Absolutely self contradictory.

I'm sorry for what you and your son and his friend are going through. I hope the friend can one day find peace, but for now I hope he has at least some support.

Women won't notice any difference in terms of their day to day life, because most people have never and will never knowingly come into contact with a transgender person.

This reveals a lot about you @izimbra
Women can still care about what happens to other women and girls even if they're not in the same situation
I don't imagine I'll ever win a top sporting medal or go to prison. I still care very much about the women who do.
I've never knowingly come into contact with a member of the Taliban but I still care very much about the women in Afghanistan.

@izimbra

Yes the current tactic by TRAs is to claim that by defining two biological sexes, thus protecting single-sex spaces and sports will lead to a ban on abortion. But you've gone one further and now claiming a ban on university.

Also I may not have come across a transgender person (I have), but I have come across men who pretend to be transgender to gain access to single-sex spaces.

This is the problem with academic thoughts and concepts and ideals. What happens in real life is that women get attacked. Women want their own spaces due to experience and common sense. Academics come along and do thought experiments and say we need to treat the root cause and so we don’t like your idea.

Women can’t vote with their feet when women are being pushed into these places.
Take disabled women. They don’t get a choice of safer single sex toilets. They are put at a lot of disadvantages because of this.
There has to be a compromise and disabled women are the compromised but I don’t think any gender neutral toilets work well for able bodied women either.

I agree with you both. Is that possible or is it congnitive dissonance? 🤓

It's clear exactly what kind of GoP, ultra-conservative, regressive rhetoric Trump's position stems from, and that his election is really, really bad news for women, not to mention other groups. His views happen to converge with a prominent feminist movement on one particular issue that happens to work in our interests. Boiling all this down to left vs. right rhetoric is pretty meaningless, given the whole distinction has faded into shades of murky purple and the right frequently masquerades as the left and vice versa. His election is bad news. I'll take a small slivver of one good by-product: doesn't mean I like or support the vengeful egomaniac. All the lazy 'aligned with' rhetoric is becoming increasingly tedious.

I also agree it's likely that the opposition is at least in part to blame for this. It's been clear for some time which way the prevailing winds have been blowing. Politicians can ignore this - shouting the odds against people's legitimate concerns, marginalising them from their sports and having them fired from their professions - at their peril. If enough people feel sufficiently strongly they'll be made to pay for it at the ballot box (or before). Nicola Sturgeon and Penny Mordaunt both found this out to their political cost.

The democrats helped to bring this about. America wanted this. They voted for it. There needs to be some honest reflection as to why this is the case. Because this hideous man, who quite aside from his other misdemeanours nearly caused an insurrection last time around and should be nowhere near the White House, has secured a confident victory and now seems more revered than ever before. And this will only end up making him and his gargantuan ego more insufferable than ever.

Maybe just consider the price a generation of women will pay for it in terms of loss of access to reproductive care, employment rights, access to higher education, protection from domestic violence etc etc.

A pack of lies from you.

1. Roe v Wade was overturned before Trump was elected for his second term. The loss of Roe isn't the price of this second term. Experience of Dems lying about protecting abortion tells us that Harris wouldn't have actually done anything: a) Obama signed EO 13535 that ensured that federal funds could not be used to cover abortion care and b) he broke his promise that he ran on to codify abortion rights. Biden did nothing for four years too.
2. If you actually read the EO, you'd see that the EO protects rape shelters as single sex spaces. This improves women's protection from DV, as rape is one form that DV takes. We had an American woman on this board a few years ago who was camping in winter to escape her abuser because she feared going to a shelter that might have a male in it so much. I wonder what happened to her?
3. Protecting the definition of "women" and "girls" for Title IX purposes improves female access to higher education because mediocre men won't be able to take spaces from elite women.

Trump is a rapist, but that's not a problem to women who aren't in the same room as him. Trump has just protected women in prison, some of the most vulnerable in society, from being raped by male inmates. And he's done that on his first day in the job, as promised. Obama could learn a lesson here about keeping promises.